Christine awoke during the night, her limbs alive with frightened frenzy. She felt blindly in the dark for someone who was nowhere within her reach.

A soft cry burst forth from her lips; she was madly afraid. Perhaps, just as in her dream, she had fallen into some black, dank place where she was the only human being for thousands of feet, buried beneath the ground in a soft tomb.

At length her fingers brushed against a cold hand. It grasped hers firmly, and she felt an oddly overwhelming relief which encompassed her entirely. She rolled over, crushing herself to his warmth, his substance. His solidness was strangely soothing, something connecting her to the earth rather than the nebulous, treacherous realm of dreams.

In the few moments after this uncanny, winding spell was broken, she felt faintly embarrassed at the close contact. Why is it, then, she thought silently, that I cannot move, or am unwilling to?

There was a long silence, while she breathed heavily.

"I had a nightmare," she murmured. Her face tingled, fighting off a keen sense of humiliation. She wished she could snatch the words back out of the air, make them into something less than a dreadful cliché, but it was far too late for that. She thought then that perhaps she ought to say something else, something that mightn't make her sound so childish—but she could think of nothing.

There was another pause, strained and stretched like cat-gut. "Do you have them often?" he asked curiously.

"No," she said dully. "Not often."

He said nothing in response to this.

At another time she might have been far more embarrassed and moved away from him after all, and indeed, she was briefly tempted to do just that. Moments upon moments passed, however, and for reasons she could not begin to describe, she remained where she was, unmoving.

She calmed herself by listening to the thudding of his heartbeat beneath her hands and face. There was a different smell to him now that he no longer wore his musty garments from beneath the Opera; there was a clean smell to the nightshirt, and the skin of his throat and chest bore a strange, subtle, vaguely unwashed scent. It seemed natural, male.

It was not unpleasant or acrid, by any means—it drifted gently into her nostrils, and there was a kind of odd allure to it that she likely would not have expected, had someone described it to her in words. She had a sudden urge to run her lips and hands over his skin, to breathe in his scent more fully and feel the rough smoothness of him, like marble come alive with softness.

Something else came to the forefront of her mind then, something which abruptly brought her lurid fantasy to a swift end. She felt the dull pain between her legs, knew all too sharply that she ought not wake his appetites by engaging in such acts, or she should almost surely find herself at the business end of his spear of flesh once more.

A bland echo of resentment accompanied the thought, but in spite of this, their embrace was insofar comfortable, unthreatening, and she was reluctant to leave it yet.

The silence seemed to wrap around them, caress them. Christine felt a sort of irony about being so situated—being enfolded in his arms in order to feel secure from an errant, fleeting nightmare, when only a week past he himself had been the very real nightmare she had been madly desperate to avoid, desperate for any kind of protection which would keep him away. It seemed incurably ancient now, carrying on its dark underbelly a pang of nostalgia so sharp it nearly brought tears to her eyes. She had thought herself so dreadfully happy—how naïve she had been! Slightly distressed, distracted, at times half-mad with fear and worry, but happy—or, at any rate, looking blithely forward to the promise of happiness. So blissfully ignorant, so blindly unaware of where it would all lead, she thought numbly.

She never would have imagined this. She certainly never would have allowed herself to think even for a moment that that the feel of him beneath her hands could be inexplicably good, that being pressed to his heart and wrapped in his embrace might be a kind of relief rather than a nameless terror.

Even now, there were lingering fibers, rapidly unraveling threads which nonetheless clung still to the great tapestry of her emotion and mind, fibers which despite their withering state still screamed for her to abandon this madness, to get away before she was consumed body and soul. That had been her chief fear in the old days, being burnt up until she was nothing but a shell of her old self, being driven mad. It was still, she supposed, a vague possibility, but it seemed far more improbable now than it had months or even weeks ago.

Erik shifted under her hands and seemed about to speak. She waited with bated breath.

The seconds stretched, taut as ribbon. Christine shivered a little with cold, and he slowly drew the covers over her shoulders. His fingers paused for a moment near the side of her neck, then passed briefly over her skin, a lingering caress. He likes to touch me, she thought, and the feelings accompanying this thought seemed tangled and confused. There was more silence yet before he finally spoke.

"When Giry came upon me," he said, his voice an unreadable breath, a bland whisper, "when she looked on me at the very first, I was in a traveling fair."

There was another silence.

"But it was no ordinary exhibition," he said softly, "not one where I had my own tent to show off my talents. There was a tent, but it was not mine. Inside, there was a cage, barely large enough for a man to stand in, and inside of it, there I sat, clad in nothing but rags and my own filth."

It took a few moments for this to penetrate her mind, to realize what he was telling her. Her hands clenched around his nightshirt, and she buried her mouth in it to stop herself from making a sound.

"Is it too much?" he asked quickly. "Would you prefer I not go on?"

"No," she whispered. "No, it's all right." A small, morbid part of her wanted to hear it, wanted to hear the whole tale spill from his lips. She was dreadfully curious.

"Very well," he said gently. "I was thirty-one, if I remember it correctly. It hadn't been this way in other places. I had made money before, singing and doing my ventriloquist acts, showing off card tricks, stupid illusions that boggled the minds of average citizens. It had pleased me to do this. I had been in camps where no-one asked about my mask, where no-one cared if I hid half my face. It was part of my mystery, part of my sorcerer's reputation. But this particular camp…the gypsies there were interested in a much more lucrative profit. They stumbled upon me one night as I slept in the open air, unaware of their presence. One of the first things they did, after I was trussed up like a turkey, was to look beneath the silken strip of cloth which hid my shame. Surmising that this would fetch them a fair price in many a town, they quickly decided to keep me, rather than kill me or sell me. I told them of my talents; I told them of my feats—it didn't matter. They would not be dissuaded, and so began my imprisonment. I had been on the road to Paris, but had never dreamed I'd see it from between the gaps of stinking iron bars." There was little emotion in his voice, little enough so that a casual observer might think he felt nothing at all; attention to his choice of words, however, to the scraps of feeling drifting through his dreadful narrative, seemed to indicate that it was a numb sort of emotion, like scar tissue which felt only echoes of a formerly agonizing sensation.

Christine's eyes were closed so firmly she saw stars, half-thinking that if she concentrated her will sufficiently, there was a vague possibility that she might make the horrors of the past melt into nothing but passing shadows in the night. Her hands trembled uncontrollably, and she unwittingly drew closer to him still. It was at that moment that she noticed his body seeming to stiffen almost imperceptibly, his fingers hovering gingerly rather than handle her outright, as though he were vaguely unwilling to touch or be touched while he told of this living nightmare of his own.

She smoothed his nightshirt—merely something to do with her quivering hands—and to her surprise he relaxed a little, a small sigh slipping from his lips.

This was gratifying, she realized, in a small, odd way—the idea that she could exercise influence of any kind over emotions connected to his deep, sprawling dark past. She felt buoyed, almost hopeful.

"At length," he said in a low voice, "Giry was there. She was part of the rabble which came to gawk, although while other faces were twisted in repugnance or outright bawdy laughter, her face was pinched and drawn, as though she were disgusted more with my surroundings than with me. I can't remember if she lingered, or how long she was there at all; I paid her little heed, for she was of hardly any consequence to me—merely the fact that she had not acted like the others was not sufficient to hold my interest. I remembered her later only because I recognized the shape of her face when I saw her at the Opera, that lean, long face and the jaw that jutted ever so slightly.

"At any rate, when they'd all gone, I begged to be let out, if only for a moment. I had had enough of sitting in the wet, soiled straw, and was cramped and stooped nearly beyond the limits of my endurance; the cage was not quite wide enough for me to stretch my legs, nor was it high enough for me to stand up to my full height—you know that I am a tall man. The man counting coins laughed at me and spit dismissively in my direction, and told me that if I needed to piss—forgive me, Christine, I forgot for a moment who I was speaking to—I could do it on the floor, for it had served me well enough before. I could no longer stand it. I waited—waited until he was close to me, close to the bars—are you sure you wish to hear it, Christine? Very well—I put my hands around his throat, crushed the bones of his neck against the iron of my prison—forgive me, darling, I get a bit carried away when I speak of such things—and took the keys from his filthy pocket, unlocked my cage. Someone saw—someone shouted, and then there was an uproar, and I knew I was a dead man. Where could I hide? I ran blindly, not caring where I went, only drinking in the delicious outside air and glorying in my freedom, short-lived though it might be. I went a little mad, then, thinking that if I did not get myself away quickly enough, I should never be free again. It gave me fresh speed, fresh strength. I found a grate—I moved it, I slipped inside, not caring how dirty it was beneath—and I hid in the slimy underbelly of Paris for hours before I dared to explore my surroundings. There was an entire world beneath, in the sewers—a dripping world, an echoing world. I waited until the dead of night and came up into the shadows of the streets, my very heart beating a tattoo of warning to the world around me, screaming that I should be caught at any moment, looking like an animal in my soiled, stinking rags and uncovered face. I managed to waylay a passer-by in an alley—I stole his clothes, his shoes. I bathed in the river as much as I could to wash the stink away from me, and I used part of the man's shirt to fashion a new covering for my face. I looked rather like a beggar, but at least I didn't look like an ape. When that was done, I slept beneath a bush in the Bois, with a knife in my hand that I had stolen from the gypsy who held me captive. I didn't kill the man whose clothes I stole—you needn't worry for it. I never kill anyone needlessly, you ought to know that. I merely knocked him unconscious, rendered him limp as the rags which had hung from my emaciated frame.

"When morning came, I wandered for a while, careful to avoid even the outskirts of the fair. There was work to be had at the building site for the new Opera; this was why I had been en route to Paris from the first. I looked a rather disreputable sight, but who were they to argue with an extra hand? They hired me; I disappointed no-one, and made enough money to live on. They didn't know about the secret ways I built at night when no-one else was working, how I carved out a house for myself beneath the ground. When it was done, when the Opera stretched to the sky, I wondered how to get more work. Opportunity soon presented itself in the form of extortion. I had built so many secret passages through the place that I saw things which no-one else saw. I wrote letters of blackmail, letters that threatened to expose the guilty party of this or that unless they put the money in a certain place at a certain time. I made sure never to be seen. I soon realized that the manager of the place was the most susceptible of all to keeping scandals secret; I soon confined my efforts to him. In time, blackmail was no longer needed; merely the suggestion that strange forces were at work proved enough to coax a substantial amount of money from his pocket—and the pockets of others who came after him—like clockwork every month. This was how I made my living; it was a crude method, but an effective one. And now, dear," he sighed, "you know the full tale. There's no more to tell, aside from needless details which would alternately shock and bore your pretty ears."

Christine felt for his good cheek and awkwardly kissed it. His fingers slid along her face. "Are you troubled?" he asked softly. "Did it hurt you, to hear it?"

"A little," she said shakily. "I—"

"What?" he queried.

"Such atrocious, petty cruelties," she whispered. "How is it that men are capable of such acts? I wasn't speaking of you, for as dreadful as such a killing was, it could…could arguably be justified—I was speaking of the cage, of the open, awful display. How can it be that such things are allowed?"

"Perhaps one day mankind will rise above such things," he said, "but the world is still in a rather low and dirty state as far as compassion and base humanity extends." His warm breath brushed past her cheek. There was another stretching, winding silence, while he ran his fingers over her jaw, lightly as spider's-legs.

"Tell me again," he said huskily, "that you love me."

There was a hard, cold lump in her throat. She did her best to swallow it. The words still felt strange. "I love you," she whispered awkwardly. "I lo…love—"

His mouth descended hotly on hers, shocking pleasure which threatened to wholly overwhelm her good sense.

Her fingers became tangled in his sparse hair, embracing this rather unexpected turn of events, but then she panicked suddenly, terrified of that greedy beast between his legs which had pierced her to the hilt and unceremoniously stripped away her maidenhead. She thought she felt it through his nightshirt, against her thigh, warm and stiff and ready, and she broke away. "Forgive me," she gasped. "I can't. Not now. Perhaps…perhaps another time…" The words sounded stupid. She tried to swallow them back, but knew it was useless. "Don't think me horrid. I can't. Not so soon. I've heard it becomes better, with time…" Her face was hot.

He said nothing. His hands were on her waist, and he seemed to be somehow gathering his breath, gathering all the little bits of himself together.

"You regard me still with a fair amount of loathing, do you not?" he said in that raw, pained voice. "Especially after—"

"No, no," she gasped out. "It wasn't the story. I—"

"I was not speaking of my dismal narrative," he said softly. "Rather referring to our recent…conjugation."

Christine took her hands away from his shoulders. He grasped her fingers in his.

"I haven't any desire to speak about it," she said blandly.

"I could not help it," he said hoarsely, desperately. "I had you, at last, in my arms. All I could think was Mine, mine, and it all became a hot, mad blur of pleasure through which I was barely conscious of my own deeds, my own acts." His breath was heavier now than it had been before. She moved herself back a little.

"It shan't happen that way again," he said, his voice strained and anxious. "You have Erik's word on that."

"My life has been turned upside-down," she whispered, trying with all her might to keep her burning tears unshed. "Upended on its head. I am still endeavoring to acclimate myself to my new circumstances at all. This is but one fresh facet which will take a short while, if not a long one, to embrace. You must give me sufficient time to become accustomed to it. To-night—or this morning, which ever it is—I would prefer not to experience it again, for the moment. You must believe me when I say it isn't to hurt you."

He was silent for a moment, and then his fingers drifted over her cheek, hot and hovering.

"It does not matter," he said bluntly. "There are, of course…other ways to tame the beast." He grasped her hand in his, and slowly brought it to rest against that place which she had been trying with all her might to avoid. She struggled a little, curling her fingers into a fist so that she would not have to touch it, even through the cloth of his nightshirt.

"Cher," he said, his voice thick with desire but oddly hypnotic, sounding as though he were trying to soothe her, "cher, man's organ is rather…astonishingly susceptible to the touch of a hand. If you were to…"

"It isn't proper," she gasped out, finally wrenching her hand back. "Is it?" Her voice sounded weakly in her own ears.

"I should think a great deal of previously forbidden acts might be freshly allowed after the bonds of matrimony have been sealed," he rejoined, his voice sounding barely contained again. "Would you have touched him, if he had asked you to?"

The color shot up in her cheeks, and she felt a rush of anger. "I don't love him…Raoul…any more," she said, deliberately saying her former paramour's name at last, rather than simply he or him. She had avoided it so painstakingly—on the basis that she had been dreadfully afraid of offending Erik, which seemed stupid beyond words now—that it was a marvelous relief to blurt it aloud. It gave her a fresh sense of self, of indignation, despite the fact that her voice dropped to a whisper without her realizing it. "I'm not wed to him, but to you. He has no place in this."

"Still," Erik said, his voice soft and slightly malevolent, his breath floating against her face, "it bears contemplating. Perhaps things you think improper to do with me would not have seemed quite so improper had you chosen to wed your pretty weakling instead."

"Why?" she bit out between tears, shoving herself backwards, away from him. She felt hot with anger and humiliation, almost more than she could bear. "Why do you persist in these ridiculous intimations? They serve no purpose—they hurt me." Were his fruitless accusations a kind of unconscious revenge, she wondered, for ever having spurned him at all?

"It hardly matters, at any rate," he said at last between his teeth. "There are still other ways of taming the beast—one, in particular, with which I am embarrassingly well-acquainted."

She hadn't the slightest idea what he meant by this. As he left the bed, however, it suddenly hit her like the crack of a whip, something she had once heard about in a sermon in her younger days, when she still attended church. The realization of what he meant to do made her feel slightly sick, and humiliated her still further.

She sat up, and struck a match. The lamp came to life, and he stopped where he stood.

He was unnaturally still. His face was expressionless, but his hooded eyes moved over her in a way that made her breasts tingle. "You look well in that negligée," he said, his voice unreadable, but slithering over her like an invisible hand. "You might tempt a man."

He himself was not particularly tempting in all his hideously exposed facial glory, not to mention clad in a night-shirt which did not quite cover his calves. He looked vaguely ridiculous. She was rather taken aback by the unbidden thought that he might look more tempting in nothing at all.

"I have had enough of this," he muttered, and moved to go.

"Wait," she whispered.

He stopped again, his hand resting on the door-frame.

"You were right," she said with a little difficulty.

"Concerning?" he asked rather warily.

"Concerning…concerning changes in propriety," she said. The words bent around her tongue awkwardly, and she hated to say them. "It's simply that it seemed…unnatural. But not nearly so wicked or unnatural as what you hinted you might…" She could not continue.

His mouth twisted further into a frighteningly mirthless little smile, something almost mocking. She looked away from him, feeling numb and stupid.

"That particular act of which I spoke, the latter act which I was just leaving to commence—which you in your sweetly innocent naïveté can hardly bear to contemplate," he said silkily, sardonically, "rescued more than one tender feminine virtue, including your own—once upon more times than you would ever care to know—from my perverse inclinations. It is, of course, a matter of opinion, but one might be far more swiftly persuaded to term self-pleasuring a saving grace than an aberrant sin." He moved his hand to the door-knob, but did not turn it.

She could not look at him. She thought if she looked at him, she might wither into dust. She saw him shift out of the corner of her eye.

"Well?" he queried. He seemed faintly annoyed at her lack of a response.

Was it possible, she wondered, that he enjoyed provoking her, enjoyed eliciting these verbal battles? Did it give him some kind of perverse satisfaction? She abruptly felt quite annoyed herself.

"Most say," she said icily, knowing she was treading on precarious ground, but caring more about winning the upper hand at the moment, "that it turns people into idiots." She glanced at him, and was slightly satisfied to see his eyes narrow. "Besides," she said, some of her bravado slipping, "calling it a saving grace hardly excuses the act itself."

"Spare me your childish religious platitudes, fille," he snapped. "Women haven't the faintest conception of what it is to be a man, to have one's appetites constantly roaring to be set free, to always be exercising a rigid, tight control over oneself in order to keep from becoming a raging animal! It isn't always so for some, perhaps, but when one lives a life entirely without affection, without intimacy or human contact of any kind, it becomes unbearable. The strain is almost too much to withstand."

She clenched her hands around the sheets.

"And then," he said in a quieter, slightly hissing voice, "when one is placed in a situation where he can finally release those appetites, finally have a legitimate, sanctioned outlet for his longings, to be denied by the very same person who only recently acquiesced to his desires is the worst of all."

"Are you asking me to pity you?" she whispered, finally turning to look at him directly. Her indignation had trumped her more gentle nature entirely. "You seem to have perfected feeling sorry for yourself. You take hardly any thought for my feelings—you never have—and then you dare to hold me responsible for your own choices—"

"Christine," he said between his teeth, coming very close to her, "take care. I am hanging by a slim thread."

She blanched, but didn't move.

His hand gripped the end-table. "A beautiful woman can drive a man mad," he breathed, his voice shuddering, his body seeming to shrink a little. "Mad with longing—so mad that it can very nearly blind him to his more…rational senses."

Christine could not fathom why she suddenly felt a familiar tingle between her legs. She had a shivering feeling of goose-flesh on her shoulders, on her back and breasts. Her body seemed unbearably warm.

Was it merely flattery which made her thus? The idea of how intoxicating he found her, the notion of this strange power she might exercise over him, as she had imagined all along?

"If only you had the faintest notion of it—" he whispered, "you might, perhaps, be able to forgive my brash impulses."

She could not move. Control over her own muscles seemed a delicate impossibility. All her anger seemed to melt, try as she would to hold it in place.

Stories floated through her mind, stories from the dormitory girls. It was dreadful at first, she remembered one of them saying, so dreadful I thought I should never want to do it again, but…

Soon you can't live without it, another had finished—Seline had been her name. A good romp is more brilliantly heady than cheap wine. And just try doing it after an argument! God, there's nothing like it.

Her cheeks flushed, and her thighs slowly parted, covered as they were by the chemise. It was still an unmistakable gesture. She could hardly believe herself, could hardly feel herself inside her own body, as if it had a will entirely its own.

His breath was shuddery again, coming from a half-open mouth and heaving chest. His eyes glimmered with desire, hot and tangible.

"If you come to me now," she whispered desperately, beginning to feel a hot rush of panic again, "do be sure to do it gently." She prayed she wouldn't regret this.

He stepped forward, and she leaned back. "Gently," she said quickly.

"Gently," he repeated, his breath coming fast. He lifted his hands toward her. Suddenly he stopped. "The light?" he asked vaguely.

"Out," she whispered. "Please." To perform this act while the room was lit seemed somehow embarrassing, too exposing.

He fumbled with it and blew the flickering flame into darkness. "Christine," he whispered, a prayer which turned into a groan. "I love you, you darling little fool. I can't bear it."

Her arms came tentatively up for him, and their mouths met, lips wet with each other, devouring. Christine felt limp and taut by turns, riding an unexpectedly ardent wave of desire. His words came back to her—mine—and she felt them like the edge of a delicious sword. I belong to him, she thought, and he belongs to me. It was a shocking, strange thought, overtaking her completely.

Their hands and lips moved over each other, sliding under clothing and slipping upon skin. Perhaps, Christine thought, the girl Seline had been right when she had hinted at the pleasure of reconciling after an argument.

Her fingers drifted unwittingly across his hot, stiff member, eliciting a hissing gasp from between his teeth, and she felt utterly awkward then. She quickly withdrew her hand, choosing instead to let it hover near his round chest. The hairs tickled her skin through the opening in his nightshirt, and she ran her fingers through them.

He shivered violently. "Erik would die for you," he muttered against her throat, making a little shock of delight race up her thighs. He put his burning hand between her legs, cupped her womanhood in his palm and buried his fingers in the dark curly hair. It was an experimental, awkward clutch, but she nearly lost her head completely. "Erik," she gasped, feeling a gush of involuntary arousal which clung to his fingers, sticky, clear fluid. His hand tightened around her.

"I see now, I think," he breathed, "I must woo my bride, woo her sweetly if she is to be a willing participant in the dance of bodies." He ran his free hand down her chin and throat, and she writhed against him, making a little moan of breath come from somewhere deep. "Goddess," he groaned, and she met his mouth again, even accepting his seeking, searching tongue. If this was not wicked, she could think of nothing that was.

Her thighs parted for him almost involuntarily. He fumbled for a moment before pushing himself forward, proceeding much more slowly than the first time, as though he were making a valiant attempt to keep himself in check. Her body stretched a little to accommodate him, made simpler now by the slippery moisture coating her insides, the byproduct of her body's inexplicable excitement. His entry burned only a little, scraping briefly against the still-sore remnants of her maidenhead, but the pain was dull rather than sharp, its edges softened by slick, sliding ardency.

He began his rhythm then—perhaps not as gently as he had indicated in his intent—but nevertheless, at the cusp of each spearhead, she felt little lightning-bolts of pleasure mixed with the lingering dull pain. They came at her again and again, racing up her body like tiny shocks and beginning to build momentum. Christine began to keenly realize how it was that this might be enjoyed, how this could quite possibly become something to look blissfully forward to rather than loathe.

His gasps wafted against her ear, and her fingernails dug lightly into his back. She felt impaled upon a spike of pleasure and pain, something which held a gathering promise of deliciousness.

"Yesss," he whispered, and then gave a kind of hitched groan, his movements suddenly jerky and arrhythmic. He pressed himself against her, gripping her thighs, and then gave a long sigh.

There was a lingering silence for a few moments. "Better?" he whispered hoarsely.

"Oh, yes," she sighed. And it had been better than the first, there was no doubt about that—but on another level entirely, she felt a little like a marionette whose strings had been cut in the midst of a performance, as though there had been more, more beyond imagining.

She did not say this aloud. She tried to quiet the murmurings of her body, tried not to let herself be bothered by the dangling feeling of their tryst's swift end. There was a kind of terrible irony, she thought, to the fact that the first time had seemed an eternity, full of pain and embarrassment—but this time, wrapped in the heady warmth of desire, it had taken hardly any time at all, and in fact had seemed to end far too soon.

He relaxed, sliding his fingers against a few stray strands of her hair. His sex felt strangely soft and flaccid as it slipped from her body, rather than hard and stiff. She knew next to nothing about these sorts of things, and it surprised her a little, having hardly noticed it the first time. She didn't dare ask him about it, however, for fear of sounding impossibly ignorant.

He rolled over onto his back. She wanted to run her hand over his torso, wanted to touch him, but felt oddly shy.

"What does it feel like?" she murmured suddenly, and then blushed, afraid she had gone too far with questions that ought to be confined to the privacy of one's own mind, forever unanswered.

His weight shifted a little on the bed. She wondered if she had embarrassed him.

"Picture a catapult," he said after a long, awkward moment. "Picture it being under unbelievably delicious strain, a kind of keen agony as its rope becomes tauter and tauter, and then picture it springing loose, its burden vaulting into the sky—and then, no longer held up by outside forces, collapsing back exhaustedly, its work finished until the fighters decide to load it with another missile—which might take minutes, or hours."

She felt vaguely mortified by this, but only a little confused. She had seen pictures of catapults, and after recollecting his own behavior before, during and after, felt more or less adequately informed by his strange metaphoric description.

"It's something that can't be explained in bald, plain language," he said, his breath still heavy, but with the aftermath of exertion. "Not well, at any rate."

"It's all right," she said uncomfortably. "I believe I understand." Was it possible, she wondered, to experience something akin to such explosive release herself?

He paused. "I won't ask you about your own sensations," he said blandly. "At least, not yet."

"They seem to be budding, awakening," she said, and then felt heartily embarrassed.

"Ah," he said, his voice soft.

They said nothing for a little while. "You ought to have your rest," he said at last, his voice quiet, strangely subdued. "I'm afraid I've been a bit of a beast, myself. Sleep as long as you please tomorrow—as long as you please, do you hear? I shan't wake you for anything short of the police, or a fire."

Christine felt too tired to respond to this, almost too tired to smile. She felt sleep claiming her, pulling her into the pillow and drifting at the corners of her eyes, inexorably down, down, until it wrapped her in its soothing grasp at last.